The logic of the housing and cost of living crises is generally that of inclusion, jealousy and acquisition: ‘but how can I get a house—and cheaper?’ Rarely do we question the underlying violence of erecting these buildings as settlers on unceded land. Houses look wonderfully innocent, which is why the family home in artistic contexts is often an ironic motif set against the apparent promise of safety: hauntedness in the horror genre; a place to cover-up predatory, intimate threats in David Lynch’s films. Building on previous work, Alana now moves the question of colonial culpability from the macro—monarchy, mining, infrastructure, extraction and the other big-ticket themes in Australian contemporary art today—to the more confronting, everyday world of the domestic.

‘Immigrants are prepared to accept the arrangements of the state to which they move, including its borders, and therefore to be part of an existing political community, whether or not they favour its mode of governance,’ writes political scientist Mahmood Mamdani (and father of Zohran). ‘Settlers aim to create their own discrete political community or colony, hence the term ‘settler colonialism’. Settlers are always at odds with the native communities among which they live.’

Housing is both a right and completely stricken, a way for colonies to displace original inhabitants. This is one aspect of what is unsettling about colonisation as it plays out over the centuries. The Australian colonial home with its Colorbond aesthetic is sacred. So is Bunnings. The renovations never end. Simultaneously, citizens shut out of stable housing—be it in the asset form, public housing or long-term renting—live in undulating crisis.

Some theorists argue that the benefits of colonialism are even shared with the middle classes: should you muscle through the financial stress of servicing a mortgage, there is a good chance you will eventually do well out of successive governments’ tax subsidies to fuel the property boom in the form of rising house prices. Debt, in this neoliberal model, can eventually buy affluence.

It’s hard not to get defensive, isn’t it? 

Suppose there was a sovereign nation called Aboriginal Lands which developed new, egalitarian policies linking shelter and country, how then might housing be discussed?

One million houses stand empty in Australia, despite the universal need for secure tenure and an adequate standard of living. Alana recently sat down at her desk to write a letter seeking a patron, who would ideally be an owner of multiple spare houses offering a rent-free lease for ten years in return for credit in all Alana’s work. ‘This might seem like an absurd proposition, but in many ways it is the most realistic path to stable housing that lies before me,’ wrote Alana, balancing satire and seriousness. She has printed 1000 A1 copies of this letter, packaged them into envelopes and stamped the front with the words To the Owner (of multiple properties) in red ink. She plans on letter-dropping them to the most expensive postcodes in Sydney and Perth, and wherever else the work may lead.

Such are the enduring inequalities for a system that sees shelter as an asset. The polaroids in Alana’s works When we win lotto. and Nice car. Can’t sleep in it. deepen these themes, bringing the tongue-in-cheek words of Alana’s mother to snaps of aspirational dream homes and fancy city cars whose size would fail to accommodate the unsheltered wanderer in-between rentals.

Likewise, in the video work the deceptively simple need for a home (on other peoples’ land), the woman reciting her wobbly childhood rental history needs care. The video takes on a mythical quality by refusing to name its anyplace suburban locations. Against the sound of eggs frying, the girl’s itinerant timeline is marked by points of Indigenous erasure: a reference to Truganini in her school curriculum, an encounter with an Aboriginal midden, displacement for the construction of a sports stadium. While the girl’s life is complicit in the colonial project, she is suffering from precarity too, wrote a friend of Alana’s in an email upon seeing the video, in her life with a single mother in insecure work. I love this generous reading, because it shows the beautiful opportunity for solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people on the question of land—if we are honest about repatriation and what cannot be undone. It’s this very desire for solidarity that has seen some private landholders begin to hand back entire valleys and paddocks. In 2019, an elderly farming couple, the Teniswoods, returned half their 220 hectare property in Little Swanport to the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania—a healing, humble action far ahead of government policy.

Working in the public library nearest to my house, I recently overheard an English language class for new migrants in the next room. The teacher stumbled a little as she tried to explain the concept of terra nullius the way you might to a child. The open parklands, grasslands and waterways seen by the first colonisers didn’t look like farms, the teacher explained, because they weren’t divided by fences into paddocks, but there was land management, aquaculture and plant cultivation at work. This farming analogy applies to housing, too. The essence of colonialism is the destruction of Indigenous homes, which don’t look like Western edifices. We could say that the mountains destroyed to create mining infrastructure and new suburbs in Western Australia in the dual videos Displacement and Replacement and A Community is Formed might not look like accommodation, but that’s precisely what they are. ‘Scenery’ for some is ‘home’ for others.

In the video Bricks and Mortar, we can see colonialism taking place one brick, one wall, one house at a time in Fremantle, WA. In this work, suburban development feels so graphically colonial. You can feel the expansion and growth as the labourer does the repetitive work of the Australian Dream. But Bricks and Mortar, alongside Beach, has been put in reverse—raising the material possibility and impossibility of undoing all of this. Alana’s videos are either pulled out of archives and edited, or shot on Super 8mm, an old format that blurs the look of past and present—a time-blurring formal decision to suggest that colonialism is still in process, not past.

‘Decolonisation brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools,’ wrote Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang in their famous 2012 paper, Decolonisation is not a metaphor. ‘The easy adoption of decolonising discourse, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonise our schools,” or use “decolonising methods,” or, “decolonise student thinking,” turns decolonisation into a metaphor… Such moves ultimately represent settler fantasies of easier paths to reconciliation.’

In the 1990s, when stories about land rights and the Wik decision were on the nightly news, racists would taunt and threaten that Indigenous people would ‘come for our homes’. ‘Why can’t they come for our homes? And what would happen if they did?’ Alana asked me in her studio. ‘I would like to have a home. And that’s the tension.’ She’s making a case for the radical beauty of shared personal responsibility for colonial injustice.

So: got any land? 

Lauren Carroll Harris is the former curator of Prototype, a digital platform for video art, and the author of We Don’t Belong to Ourselves, forthcoming through Ultimo Press in 2027.

Alana Hunt is a non-Indigenous artist and writer formerly based on Miriwoong Country in Kununurra and now on Gadigal Country, Sydney. Her practice is characterised by interdisciplinary fluency, weaving together visual art, literature, filmmaking and social engagement.

Jasmin Stephens is an independent curator, mentor and lecturer on contemporary art in Australia and Southeast Asia, living on Gadigal Country.

Supporters
Alana Hunt: A Deceptively Simple Need is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund as part of the Copyright Agency Partnerships (CAP) Commission series and through the generosity of PICA’s Art Commissioners.

Images: Alana Hunt, Rubble (triptych), 2025, 35mm film, dimensions variable. Photos courtesy of the artist.